InfoQ Homepage Windows Azure Content on InfoQ
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Boost Website Performance with the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service
The newly-released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service stores distributed data in-memory to improve performance on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. It’s highly scalable, will cache any type of data regardless of size, and is secured via the AppFabric Access Control Service.
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Steve Marx Explores Hidden Gems in Windows Azure
Steve Marx, Tactical Strategist at Windows Azure, gave a presentation at MIX11 on “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Windows Azure”, highlighting a list of things that can be done with WA but may not be common knowledge. We got in touch with Steve to ask him more about AppFabric, Startup Tasks, Blob leasing and more -
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Microsoft Releases Windows Azure Platform SDK 1.4
Yesterday Microsoft released the Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for Visual Studio 2010. The release fixes several significant bugs including the nasty RDP bug and adds capabilities like multiple administrator support from the enhanced Windows Azure Connect portal.
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Released: Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide
This past weekend, the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft released the final version of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide on MSDN. The guide was built in an open community fashion on Codeplex by the team this past year and has been downloaded over 5000 times.
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NCBI BLAST for Windows Azure
Microsoft is now offering NCBI BLAST for the Windows Azure platform. NCBI BLAST was created by a group of researchers working for the National Institutes of Health, a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. NCBI describes BLAST as a tool that “finds regions of local similarity between sequences” of protein and DNA chains.
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Microsoft is Planning to Allow Private Installations of Windows and SQL Azure
Along with partners HP, Dell, and Fujitsu, Microsoft is offering private installations of Windows Azure. The product will be offered in appliance format, meaning Microsoft will be selling the hardware and software as a bundle. While no pricing is set, the target audience is customers like eBay who can afford at least one thousand servers.
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Does Azure Debugging Cost Too Much?
Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, is reasonably priced for what it offers. A basic package can be had for under $100/month. But if anything goes wrong you are going to want some debugging support. Unfortunately the only tool worth talking about is IntelliTrace, which costs 11,899 USD per developer.
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Scenarios and Solutions for Using Windows Azure
Bill Zack, Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, has detailed in an online presentation key scenarios for using the cloud and solutions provided by Windows Azure.
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Windows Azure Now Generally Available, Moving From Free To Pay
As of February 1st, Microsoft's public cloud offering, Windows Azure, became part of the growing cloud market as it started charging for its services. Azure is one of the first Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings to move from free, "early-adopter" to a pay-as-you-go business model. InfoQ spoke with Matt Deacon of Microsoft UK to learn more about this change and what it means for Azure users.
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Advice for Securing Data in Windows Azure
In a recent MSDN article entitled Crypto Services and Data Security in Windows Azure, Jonathan Wiggs provides advice on securing data stored and processed through Windows Azure. InfoQ explored the topic in more detail to understand some of the security ramifications which come with deploying an application to the cloud.
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Azure Feature Voting Results
While voting is still open, there are some clear front-runners for the most needed features. The vote is being run by Mike Wickstrand, Senior Director of Product Planning for Windows Azure, and hosted at www.MyGreatWindowsAzureIdea.com. Of the top 6 items, there are four requests for making Azure cheaper in various scenarios, a request for .NET 4.0 support, and the need for sending email.
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Azure Storage Options
The Windows Azure Platform offers a wide range of storage options for unstructured, structured, and message style data. Deciding which option to use can be quite daunting, especially with the limitations of this new technology being so uncertain. This piece enumerates the storage options and discusses their basic capabilities and limitations relative to the other options available on the platform.
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Free and Reduced Price Windows Azure Packages
In order to spur adoption, Microsoft is offering free and reduced price packages for Windows Azure. All of these packages are available from February 1st thru June 30th, with January free to everyone using the North America data centers.
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WordPress has Gone Live on Windows Azure
On Tuesday Microsoft announced that Windows Azure would support the LAMP stack, well perhaps “the -AMP stack” is a better term. With Linux out of the picture, Microsoft is courting developers building on top of Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python including the users of the wildly popular WordPress blogging software.
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Microsoft Enters Cloud Computing with 2 New Data Centers
Microsoft has announced the opening of 2 new data centers, one in Dublin, Ireland, and another in Chicago, US. These data centers are a preparation for the announcement Microsoft is going to make at PDC 2009 regarding the commercial availability of Windows Azure services.